random posts

Saturday, 14 October 2017

Though the search for non-baryonic “dark matter” that accounts for around thirty percent of the composition of the Cosmos (compared to the around five percent of the familiar luminous matter—all else is radiant or dark energy, astronomers believe) continues unabated, researchers can claim a significant victory in having found the remaining, heretofore undetected “normal” matter of the Universe. Of that conjectured five percent of the total, only an astonishingly small ten percent could be definitively pointed to by star-gazers. That missing matter (or at least a good chuck of it), however, seems to have been found through two independent studies that suggest it is diffusely spread out over immense distances in a network of intergalactic filaments of hot gas. The nature of these strands that link the cosmic web opens yet another mystery to investigate.